This Week is a huge loss to British television

At almost seventy, Andrew Neil is rapidly dismantling his TV empire. It is the end of an era. 

First he left The Sunday Politics (2012-18), the best of the Sunday political chat shows, which barely lasted a year without him. Then Daily Politics (2003-18) was replaced by Politics Live. Less Neil, more chat, it has been described by the BBC as a “fast-moving, conversational show featuring a blend of political interviews, discussion and video content [sic] designed to be shared digitally [sic],” with “more shareable content [sic].” Then, yesterday, it was announced that This Week (2003-19) would be leaving our screens.

Each programme had its own personality. The Sunday Politics had big set-piece interviews and an excellent panel which included regulars like Tom Newton-Dunn, Helen Lewis, Isabel Oakeshott and Janan Ganesh of the FT. This Week was built around Alan Johnson, Michael “Choo-Choo” Portillo, Liz Kendall and in the early days, Diane Abbott. The feel was late-night, laid-back, humorous. Something a bit more grown-up after the middlebrow knockabout on Question Time. A sort of glass of whiskey after all that pop.

But what these programmes had in common was Neil, opinionated, analytical and super-sharp. Since the Blair years, Neil has been the unquestioned doyen of TV interviewers. Chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students in 1971, a key figure in Murdoch’s glory years as editor of The Sunday Times (1983-94) and founding chairman of Sky TV, he has often been wrongly accused of bias. But Neil is superbly impartial, and shows public service broadcasting in its best light. 

It is hard to think of a major figure in British broadcasting who has changed his reputation around in the way Neil has. For some years he was a figure of fun;“Brillo”. There was a running gag in Private Eye about a photo of Neil in a vest and baseball cap with a young woman often mistaken for Pamella Bordes. The jokes have stopped now. Neil is one of the most widely respected people in British current affairs.

His interviews are a master-class in tough interrogation. I assume that unlike some of his contemporaries he has a superb research team. Behind every top interviewer is a first-rate producer and group of researchers. Neil clearly has the best.  

What sets him aside from other political interviewers, though, is that unlike Humphrys or Paxman, he knows his economics. I remember Stephanie Flanders once saying that she had to leave an event at the BFI and teach Paxman some economics. She would never have made that joke about Neil.

Neil loves recurring jokes. “Itchy and Scratchy” (Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo). All that joshing about the late-night transmission time, the tiny audience, the even tinier budget and “talking of villains”, the hopeless pundits on the sofa. But there’s clearly an element of loyalty in Neil’s success: he’s worked for almost ten years with Fraser Nelson at The Spectator, he stayed with Murdoch for over a decade, has worked with Portillo on This Week since it started in 2003, and presented Daily Politics with Jo Coburn for almost ten years. He tweets regularly and admiringly about his alma mater, Glasgow University.  

There’s also a deeply serious side to Neil. He gave a blistering attack on ISIS, “a bunch of loser jihadists”, with their “death cult barbarity that would shame the Middle Ages”, after the attacks in Paris in 2015. He spoke movingly about the Las Vegas shootings and the murder of a French gendarme, slaughtered by an Islamic terrorist. Last Thursday he took on John McDonnell’s attack on Churchill. “Churchill had many blemishes and they cannot be washed away. But when this country had dire need of a hero, he was there. There was nobody else. And he was heroic, like no Briton before, or since.”

And then there are eviscerating interviews. Some are predictable enough, figures like Ken Livingstone and Owen Jones. But the more memorable interviews have been with Conservative minister, David Gauke (“It’s a shambles”), Lucy Powell during the 2015 election campaign (“You have no idea where I live, just answer the question”) and the unforgettable car-crash interviews with Green Party leader, Natalie Bennett, Shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry and Labour’s Anneliese Dodds (“Have we grown more slowly than France? Have we grown more slowly than Italy? Have we grown more slowly than Spain?”).

There is no one on British television who can conduct such interviews or deliver such powerful pieces to camera, who can hold politicians to account with such rigour and impartiality. As This Week comes to an end and we move into an era of “more shareable content”, we should be clear about what we are losing – and hope that we are not seeing the end of Andrew Neil at the BBC.